Free Republic

Saudi Arabia will run out of oil stocks for exports if it doesn't restart its major pipeline to the Red Sea within days, leading to a loss of up to 4% of global supply, Saudi oil buyers and traders said. A further decline in Saudi flows will worsen the global supply crunch, which has already pushed global fuel prices to record highs, spurred inflation around the world and sent U.S. bond yields to the highest levels since the 2008 financial crisis. Since drone attacks forced Saudi Arabia to shut its huge east-west oil pipeline on Friday, Riyadh has not given...

ADEN/DUBAI, Sept 12 - Saudi Arabia has shut down its East-West pipeline after the vital oil conduit came under aerial attack in the widening Middle East war. The world’s largest crude oil exporter temporarily closed the pipeline after a drone attack that both Baghdad and Riyadh said had originated in Iraq, where Iranian-backed militias operate. Iraq dismissed a military commander on Saturday in response to the attack. The 1,200-kilometre (745-mile) pipeline running across the Arabian Peninsula had helped Saudi Arabia to bypass a shipping logjam in the Strait of Hormuz, where tanker traffic has slowed to a trickle due to...

Saudi Arabia’s critical East-West oil pipeline system was struck on Thursday, with multiple pumping stations hit in an attack that could threaten one of the kingdom’s most important crude export routes, according to CNN, citing two U.S. officials familiar with the matter... ...OilPrice.com reported that NASA FIRMS had detected multiple large fires near the East-West pipeline, while Sentinel-3 imagery appeared to show a massive plume of black smoke stretching across western Saudi Arabia. One U.S. official said the attack involved drones originating from Iraq, although responsibility for the strikes has not yet been established... ...It also remains unclear whether the...

In one of the most underreported happenings in the Persian Gulf conflict, Yemen’s internationally recognized government and allied militias have inflicted a series of ground setbacks on Iran-backed Houthi forces over the past month. These defeats are reversing parts of a late-summer Houthi push toward the Red Sea undertaken as part of the Iranian strategy of widening its conflict with the U.S. The Yemeni government is sufficiently confident in the new fronts that they now describe this as the start of a campaign to take the Houthi capital of Sanaa. The Iranian-backed Houthis have been Iran's key ace-in-the-hole for years....

The United Nations has decided that Britain has not grovelled enough. After years of toppled statues, boarded-up war memorials and official lectures about “colonialism,” a UN human-rights committee now wants the country that ended the Atlantic slave trade to fill its public squares with statues of “people of African descent,” The globalist body also suggests Britain should rewrite what children are taught, and treat historic slavery as a live brief for migration policy and hate-speech enforcement. This comes in the form of formal “reparatory justice” guidance from the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, published six months after...

Riyadh strikes Yemeni airport (Sana’a) after Trump backs military action against Houthis The strike on Monday (13 July) damaged the runway and prevented an Iranian airliner from landing in the Yemeni capital, which is controlled by the Houthis, a pro-Tehran proxy militia... ...Two US officials told Axios that Donald Trump gave Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia his support for the military action... ...The incident breaks a four-year truce between Riyadh and the Shia militia, which followed a decade-long war that killed approximately 377,000 people, according to United Nations estimates, most of which were caused by starvation and...

Maritime commerce has become increasingly more dangerous lately, with attacks on cargo ships in the Black Sea, the Red Sea, and the Strait of Hormuz, among others. Now, the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean off the Horn of Africa have returned to the list, as Somali pirates take full advantage of the instability caused by the Iran war to get back to their predatory ways. At one point last week, six captured vessels were being held off the Puntland coast as the pirates demanded hefty ransoms. Two of the vessels were released on Saturday.” The Iran conflict left...

The Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen announced today that they were closing the Red Sea to ships from Saudi Arabia.The Houthis have repeatedly threatened to close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait during the U.S.-Iran war. The strait is a choke point for commercial ship traffic that connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and global markets.The militants, in a statement carried by state news, accused the Saudis of laying an “aggressive siege” against them. Tensions escalated last week after they claimed that Riyadh had bombed Sanaa International Airport.It's actually a bit confusing why the Houthis took this action today....

KAN Israel News, citing an Iranian-linked news network, reports that $3 billion was transferred from Abu Dhabi to Tehran aboard a private Boeing 737. According to the report, Iran agreed to halt direct attacks on Israel after receiving a U.S. message, delivered through Qatar, in from further strikes in Lebanon. The funds were reportedly flown to Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport aboard UAE Royal Jet aircraft A6-RJF, which was tracked traveling from Abu Dhabi to Iran. At this stage, the flight itself was genuine (it happened during Irans airspace closure) and the presence of a UAE delegation in Tehran has been reported...

Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis said on Monday that they would ban ships linked to Israel from the Red Sea after Israel renewed its military attacks on Iran, adding to concerns about global shipping and energy flows.

Few biblical tales have stirred the imagination across cultures as powerfully as the legendary meeting between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Told in the First Book of Kings (10:1–13), the story describes a mysterious monarch who traveled from a distant land with caravans of gold, spices, and precious stones to test Solomon with riddles and witness his famed wisdom... Yet, despite the vividness of the episode, the identity and location of her kingdom remain one of the Bible’s enduring mysteries. The two most widely accepted views place Sheba either in southern Arabia (present-day Yemen) or in Ethiopia... Proponents...

"For I do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, And all were baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea, And all ate the same spiritual food, And all drank the same spiritual drink: for they drank of a spiritual rock which followed them, and the rock was Christ."In I Cor. 10:1-4, Paul indicated clearly that the history of the children of Israel is a type, a foreshadowing, of the history of the New Testament believers in Christ. The crossing of the Red...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iranian-backed Houthi rebels entered the month-old war in the Middle East on Saturday, claiming two missile launches at Israel. About 2,500 U.S. Marines arrived in the region. And Pakistan’s government said that regional powers plan to meet Sunday to discuss how to end the fighting.

excerpt- The Pentagon on Friday posted photos showing Ford and USS Bainbridge (DDG-96) sailing through the Suez Canal on Thursday. The transit takes the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier into a part of U.S. Central Command where the Iran-backed Houthis have attacked both U.S. warships and commercial vessels over the last two-and-a-half years. excerpt Meanwhile, the next aircraft carrier expected to deploy from the United States finished its training exercise on Thursday, the Navy announced. USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77), its escorts and air wing wrapped up the composite unit training exercise

A volcano in Ethiopia erupted for the first time in at least 12,000 years on Sunday, sending a cloud of ash and smoke northeast across the Red Sea. Hayli Gubbi, a volcano in the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, erupted at around 8:30 a.m. UTC (3:30 a.m. EST) on Nov. 23. By 8 p.m. UTC (3 p.m. EST), the explosive phase of the eruption had stopped, according to the Toulouse Volcanic Ash Advisory Center (VAAC) in France. This is the first time Hayli Gubbi is known to have erupted in the Holocene — the present geological epoch that began at...

Israel has taken the controversial decision to recognise the breakaway state of Somaliland as an independent nation, sparking condemnation from many other countries. China is the latest to condemn the decision, with its foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian telling reporters: "No country should encourage or support other countries' internal separatist forces for its own selfish interests." China outlined its position ahead of the UN Security Council holding an emergency session to discuss Israel's decision. Israel on Friday became the first country in the world to acknowledge Somaliland as a standalone republic, more than 30 years after the region declared independence...

The UN Security Council will convene an emergency session on Monday to discuss Israel’s recognition of Somaliland, with members slated to condemn Jerusalem’s move. Israel announced the step on Friday, days before Somalia is slated to take over the presidency of the Security Council. In the announcement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the recognition was “in the spirit of the Abraham Accords,” and that the countries would cooperate in “economic fields, on agriculture, [and] in the fields of social development.” The decision was met with anger from several regional powers who accused Israel of undermining the sovereignty and territorial integrity...

WASHINGTON — The results of four command investigations related to serious mishaps during the Harry S. Truman carrier strike group’s recent deployment point to inadequate training and poor performance by ship crews as well as their commanders, according to newly released Navy investigation reports.The reports, which were heavily redacted for public consumption, paint a picture of strike group sailors and officers who erred in their judgment and failed to communicate properly while under exceedingly high pressure and operational tempo as the strike group was conducting operations to counter Houthi rebel attacks in and around the Red Sea.The investigations released today...

…One general observation we can make right from the beginning is that in crossing the Red Sea, the children of Israel were coming OUT OF something bad. In the crossing of the Jordan River, the children of Israel were coming INTO something essentially good, but not without its challenges. And in between, there was a desert or wilderness. This desert represents a training place; a place of learning; a place of trials; and a place of testing. Even Jesus went into the wilderness to be tested (Luke 4:1-14). The children of Israel were also lead by the Lord in the...

Rescuers launched a search Wednesday for survivors of a Liberian-flagged cargo ship that came under attack from Yemen’s Houthi rebels in the Red Sea, authorities said. At least three mariners were killed and two were wounded. The attack on the Greek-owned Eternity C follows the Iranian-backed Houthis attacking another vessel, the bulk carrier Magic Seas, on Sunday in the Red Sea, which they subsequently sank. The assaults are the first Houthi attacks on shipping since late 2024 in the waterway that had begun to see more ships pass through in recent weeks.